


How to Get on Living

by lifeiluvyou



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Boys In Love, Feelings, M/M, Nightmares, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-13
Updated: 2017-01-13
Packaged: 2018-09-17 06:26:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 18,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9309455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeiluvyou/pseuds/lifeiluvyou
Summary: Begins right before Gansey dies. Together, Adam and Ronan come to terms with everything they've lost and let themselves appreciate what they've gained.





	1. Chapter 1

It was an impossible choice. To stand next to Gansey as he looked death in the eyes or to go to Ronan.   
  
Adam turned away from Blue and Gansey as they embraced. He already felt his insides dying, turning to stone, but he was called back to the car by Ronan's choked gasps, like a terrible siren song, it drowned out everything else.  
  
The black ooze leaked from his ears and snaked a deadly trail down his neck. Adam slammed onto the pavement beside the driver’s seat among the dream stuff that kept appearing and shaking out of Ronan's clenching hands. There were more winking fireflies and orbs that floated like bubbles but when they popped they let out a little explosion of light like a flash bulb. Pebbles clattered to the pavement at Adams feet. He watched Ronan's chest heave unevenly and he reached out, unsure where to touch him. He was dying.   
  
When Adam was fourteen he fell off the roof of the trailer. His father had sent him up during a thunderstorm to kick the bum satellite into submission so it would transmit the nationals game to their crap TV. The heat had been oppressive, crushing, bearing down on Adam's chest. A crack of thunder tore the sky open above him and he lost his footing. He slipped over the edge and fell for hours, days until his back met the dirt. The profound blow forced the air from his lungs in a resounding whoosh. He lay there helpless, unproductively gasping at the thick air like a fish thrown on the deck of a boat. His lungs felt as if they'd been pressed between the pages of a thick book, dried like petals and they'd never expand again   
  
That was watching Ronan die.   
  
Adam was losing his life support, everything that had kept him alive the past few years.   
  
"Please." please   
  
Ronan forced himself violently back to consciousness. His eyes flew open as hundreds of scraps of paper cascaded from his hands and caught the breeze. Unguibus et rostro. In Adam's handwriting.   
  
Ronan’s eyes rolled back and he was under again, pulled down into hell by the demon. Adam watched Ronan fight, and he was helpless, his lungs pressed and wasted.   
  
A faint thud sounded behind the driver’s door. The unmistakable sound of a body crumpling. Blue's muffled cries.   
Adams world was crumbling. 

  


Suddenly Ronan surged back to awareness. He sucked in an infinite breath. His back arched, his muscles rigid and then he gave way, melting slightly into the seat. His head fell to the side, his blue eyes locking Adam in an exhausted, agonized gaze.   
  
"Parrish..."  
  
His name was less than a whisper on Ronan's lips. His handsome, sharp features rendered deadly by the black streaming from his nose, rendered soft by being completely spent. Adam reached out a hand and cupped the back of his shaved head. He was alive.   
  
Ronan seemed to realize this at the same moment. His eyes flared wide, his brows furrowed. With the determined strength that only anger can gift someone who had just nearly died, Ronan pulled himself out of the car. He stumbled into Adam when he made it to his feet. And then he raged forward to where Blue was slumped over Gansey, brushing his face with her fingers, running them through his hair. Henry looked down at them from a few feet away, shock making him rigid.   
Ronan came to an abrupt halt, his fists clenched, looking down at Gansey, betrayed.   
  
Adam felt something important rushing out of him and it's its place there was nothing.   
  
"Get him," Ronan growled, his voice raw. "Get him out of the road. He's not an animal."  
  
  They all pulled Gansey's body into the grass. Gansey's body. As if it were merely something that had simply belonged to him, another artifact he might have collected. Gansey himself was gone.   
  
"Wake up, you bastard. You fucker. How could you..." Ronan began to cry, crouched beside Gansey's body and Adam dropped into the grass.   
The next moments blurred into numb conversations, outbursts from Ronan and naive musings from Henry. Adam was barely there. He looked at Gansey's chest. So still. And he felt Cabeswater struggling for breath after how the demon had ravaged it. He could feel the pulse of the ley line below them, beating weakly against his legs and he knew there was a way.   
  
"What about Cabeswater?" Adam asked quietly. 

  



	2. Chapter 2

It took too long. Much too long. Cabeswater dying, drawing from each of them. Adam looked to Ronan, wondering if he could feel it too, but his fierce eyes were trained on Gansey. Holding on, waiting with savage, dangerous hope for signs of life.  
  
A tear finally rolled onto Adam's numb face when he felt leaves press softly to his cheeks for the last time. Like a farewell kiss. Adam closed his eyes feeling the loss in his blood, in his bones. It wouldn't matter, he told himself, it would all be worth it if Gansey would live. Please, he silently begged again. Please give him back to us. Make us whole again.   
  
And then, quietly, Cabeswater passed.   
  
With a short stuttering cough Gansey was born back into the world. His eyes fluttered open and found Blue above him.  
  
He smiled, "Jane."  
  
"Jesus," Ronan breathed, his chin dropping to his chest. He allowed himself a moment of utter relief before he snatched the dragonfly off gansey's chest, stood and turned away from them, muttering stupid fucker under his breath.   
  
He clawed his phone out of his pocket and called Declan, carrying the conversation out of their earshot.   
  
"Ganseyboy!" Henry greeted familiarly but voice was robbed of all its breezy casualness.   
  
Blue was laughing, running her hands over Gansey's face and he reached up in turn to hold hers. She helped him sit up, a smile stretched wide across his face. Adam had never seen his friend look so alive and that was saying something. Gansey had always been the most alive of all of them. The most present, the most grateful, the most loving. Gansey caught sight of Adam slumped in the grass across from him.   
  
"Are you ok?" he asked.  
  
Adam would have laughed if he had any energy left, if he wasn't still reeling over the loss of Cabeswater, if he hadn't just watched his best friend die, if half of his attention wasn't on Ronan stalking angrily back to the road.   
  
"Don't ask me that," Adam said and he sounded more serious than he intended. "you just died."   
  
Gansey smiled and it was relief. It was gratitude. They bumped fists.   
  
Then Gansey stood up with a bit of a wobble and they each rushed to catch him.    
  
"I'm alright, guys," he laughed and went to Ronan.   
  
They were too far away to hear what they said to each other, but Adam watched Ronan shake his head lightly, the muscles in his jaw rippling. He looked as if he might strike out and bite Gansey. But Gansey took a step toward him and wrapped him in a tight hug. Ronan's body went ridged for a moment as if he might be readying to run or shove him off, but then with a small sob he leaned down and put his head on Gansey's shoulder instead. Adam heard him mumble the phrase lose you too as he, Blue and Henry met them at the car. Ronan and Gansey separated awkwardly.   
  
"It's over." Gansey said and they all nodded.   
  
They began to go over semantics of what they should do next and Adam let himself drift out of the conversation. He found Orphan Girl crouching in the pile of dream things heaped beside the flung open driver’s side door. She leafed through items, bringing some to her teeth and biting down or licking them. The black gunk had dried into her hair but she didn't seem worse for wear.   
  
"Are you all right?" he asked softly, crouching across from her.  
  
For some reason he found it easier to face the little dream creature than his friends at that moment. There was Cabeswater in her and curiosity and innocence and Ronan. He didn't want to talk about what they had to do next. He didn't want to do anything next. Except maybe sleep. His mind was still trying to analyze the hellish trial they'd just underwent. There were too many emotions, too many regrets. Too much. So he chose to push it all from his mind and feel nothing but fatigue. He was so tired.   
  
Orphan Girl looked up at him and leapt into his arms. She clung to his neck with a fearsome amount of strength for something so small.  
  
“It's ok. It will be okay,” she whispered.   
  
"I know," he said and only because she had just said it did he really believe it.   
  
"Time to go, runt." Ronan's voice came from behind him.  
  
Orphan Girl peeled away from Adam and touched her index finger to his nose before crawling into the back seat.  
  
Ronan looked down at Adam and they held a gaze between them. Adams eyes said what do we do now? Did you feel Cabeswater die too? Will you ever forgive me?   
  
Ronan's eyes said nothing that Adam could discern. They were frozen and fierce. His face was violent, all angles and smeared gore, shadow and light. Then Adam’s eyes fell down to his neck. Garish purple bruising was beginning to ring the skin above his jacket collar.   
  
"Adam!" Gansey's voice momentarily pushed off the self-hatred that was banging on the unhinged door of Adam’s mind. It had always been hard to refuse Gansey anything he asked for but now... now that Adam had seen him dead he would kneel down and give him his soul as long as he stayed alive.   
  
He stood and turned away from Ronan and his expressionless face and his ruined neck and went to Gansey.   
  
"We're going to take Blue to Fox Way to let them know we're okay. I also predict her mom is going to want her to take another trip to the hospital."  
  
Blue swore behind him and he laughed.  
  
Adam felt the knocking return violently in the back of his mind. It was his hand that had scraped Blue's face, her blood under his finger nails.   
  
"You and Ronan go back to Monmouth-"   
  
"No. we're not splitting up," Adam interjected.  
  
He was unsure of everything right now except for that. He didn't trust Gansey not to drop dead again if they weren't all together. They were a team. His magicians. The perfect combination of weird accidental magic and dysfunction. How could he expect them to separate? Especially now?  
  
"We'll be back in a few hours. All of us. We'll spend the night there." Gansey dropped his voice and put a hand on Adams shoulder. "Take Ronan back. He shouldn't be alone. Neither should you."  
  
He clapped Adam on the back and he and Blue got in Henry's car and pulled away.   
  
"You coming, Parrish?" Ronan's voice was low from inside the car.   
  
"Yeah."  
  
Adam climbed into the passenger seat. Ronan took off as soon as his belt was clicked into place. Adam looked out the window, unable to bring his eyes to Ronan's bloodied and blackened face, to his bruised throat. He watched the Henrietta trees spin by him and his stomach turned. The air in the car was heavy with things he wanted say to Ronan but was completely incapable of doing. Ronan stared straight ahead, knuckles white on the steering wheel, muscles clenched.   
  
"Is Matthew okay?" he said, finally when they pulled into the parking lot of Monmouth, still looking out the window. The ink of night was seeping slowly across the sky. Had it only been two days since they were kissing each other? Time was making fools of all of them.   
  
"Yeah. Now."   
  
They sat in silence, the only sound was soft snuffling breaths from the sleeping Orphan Girl in the backseat. Adam looked at Monmouth, a repurposed castle, a well-loved fortress in the growing dark. How were they supposed to go inside and get on with living?   
  
"Listen, Parrish. I don't need a fucking babysitter. I'll take you back to your shitbox and you can go home." His words were venomous.   
  
"Shut up," Adam sighed, long immune to Ronan's attacks.   
  
"I mean it. I don't need you to-"   
  
"God, Ronan would you please stop!" Adam's voice rose but was still laced with impending sleep.  
  
He turned to Ronan, careful to avoid looking at his neck. His blue eyes pierced Adam's, ready for a fight. Adam wasn't going to give it to him. That was the easy way out, the way Ronan always dealt with his problems, excessive force. Anger was an insatiable hunger. Adam was acquainted with both of those things with painful intimacy. He couldn't do it tonight.   
  
Adam felt utterly wrung out. He had nothing left.   
  
"Don't drive me out. Don't ask me to go face all of this on my own."  
  
Ronan's eye lashes fluttered as he faltered. It made Adam’s heart ache.   
  
"Fine," Ronan said finally and it almost sounded like an apology. He got out and scooped Orphan girl from the back seat and they all went inside.   
  
"Wake up, urchin," Ronan said to the sleeping bundle in his arms. "Let's get this shit off your face."  
  
They went into the bathroom/kitchen/shower and Adam walked slowly through the moonlit cavern of the main room. The model of Henrietta was almost entirely repaired from the break in all those months ago. Gansey's wire frames were tossed carelessly across the white sheets. He'd left in a hurry. Adam wondered if he knew his fate when he stormed out of here, if he knew he wouldn't be coming back. He wondered exactly how long Gansey had known he was going to die. The thought made Adam sick so he pushed it away into the ever growing pile of things he was going to have to think of eventually. He was afraid the pile would consume and destroy him when the time came. And it was coming soon.   
  
He walked to the bathroom/kitchen/shower and found Orphan Girl sitting on the sink, her little hooves dangling and Ronan hunched over cleaning the black streaks from her ears and hair. His movements were gentle and she swung her hooves sleepily under his care.   
  
Ronan had shucked his jacket and there was no hiding the damage from Adam. He faced it head on. The dried black ooze under his nose, smudged on his chin and jaw. The small claw marks on the back of his neck he'd brought back from dreaming the firefly. And the bruises.  
  
Angry reddish purple contusions on the soft skin of his neck. Adam's hands remembered what it felt like to squeeze the life from Ronan's throat. The straining hard muscles, his unresisting hands cuffed around Adam's wrists, not fighting back.   
  
The demon had taken Adams hands and he had been helpless, ruined, killing Ronan, watching Ronan die. It was the worst form of torture. He would rather live under his father's roof for the rest of his life than go through that again.   
  
"Cut that shit out, Parrish," Ronan said suddenly, watching him. "I'm fine."   
  
He scooped Orphan Girl off the counter and brought her into Noah's room. Adam moved into the bathroom desperate for something to do, to distract him from what his hands had done. He rinsed out the cloth Ronan had been using until the water ran clear. He looked at his hands under the stream. They were his own now. But they remembered. He looked into his reflection. Claw marks rose across his cheek bone dotted with blood from where his hands had turned on him. They were his now. His.   
  
"Parrish," Ronan announced himself from the doorway.   
  
They shared another look. Adam’s eyes asked, how hard will you grieve for everything that's been taken from you? How will we ever heal from this? Should we just be thankful? Do you regret kissing me?  
  
Ronan's eyes were still fierce and frozen in their grief. Still unreadable and dangerous. Powerful. The way a loaded gun looks just lying on the table untouched.   
"Come here," Adam said, pointing the closed toilet.  
  
Ronan's eyebrow arched sharply but he did as Adam told him, dropping down to sit before him.   
  
Adam raised the cloth to Ronan's face and gently swiped and blotted beneath his nose and ears. Ronan's jaw was still clenched, his eyes hard and guarded. Adam washed away traces of the demon little by little. If Ronan let him, he would continue to do so as long as it still pained them.   
  
He tilted Ronan's head down so he could reach the wound on the back of his neck. He peeled away his dirty black t-shirt and dabbed carefully at the deep scratch underneath. Adam felt Ronan's back clench at the irritation and he placed his hand flat against Ronan's tattoo.   
  
Then Ronan's arms came around his waist as he burrowed his head into Adam's stomach.   
  
They clung to each other like that in the silence, in the dimming light, keeping their pain, their loss from blowing them apart.   
  
Adam broke away slightly and watched as Ronan lifted his head. His eyes were red. Ronan was now truly an orphan. The notion was horrible, too enormous and jagged to fully grasp. No one should have to find even one of their parents in the state Ronan had. How much could he be put through and still survive. He looked up at him and Adam cupped his cheek. He was ready to ask his questions aloud. What do we do now? Will we ever see Noah again? What can I do to take your pain away, to make this easier for you?  
  
But Ronan leaned his face into Adams palm and the bruises on his neck stretched into full display.   
  
Adam stumbled back out of Ronan's arms and careened slightly into a rack of toiletries. He couldn't look away from Ronan's neck, from his violent finger prints. How could Ronan let Adam touch him? How could Adam presume that was okay after what he'd done?   
  
"Parrish, I thought I told you to cut that shit out." Ronan said.   
  
Adam dug the heels of his hands into his eyes as if he could scrub away the memory of today, of having his control ripped away from him, of being violated, of hurting Ronan, of listening to him struggle to survive while Adam's treacherous hands clawed to end him faster.   
  
"Parrish."  
  
Adam heard his name from far away, but he was drowning. Hands closed gently around his wrists but he jerked away. He couldn't touch anyone. His hands still remembered. His eyes remembered.   
  
"Parrish!"   
  
The hands still held him. He couldn't open his eyes. He couldn't face what he'd done. What they'd lost.   
  
"Adam."   
  
Ronan's voice was soft, pleading. Everything that Ronan wasn't. Adam let him pull his hands away. His eyes fell instantly to Ronan's neck but Ronan held his jaw and made him meet his gaze.   
  
"It wasn't you."   
  
Ronan brought Adam’s hands to his mouth like he had that night at the barns, slowly, reverently. He kissed his fingers, the ones that had savaged his neck.   
  
"I'm so sorry," Adam's whisper was agony. Ronan shook his head and continued brushing his lips over Adams knuckles.   
  
"Why didn't you stop me?"   
  
Ronan's eyes flickered and he kept shaking his head as if that was the only answer Adam was getting.  
  
The door to Monmouth banged open and Adam jumped. Ronan didn't.   
  
"We have returned!" Gansey's voice exclaimed.   
  
"Parrish," Ronan's whisper was low and rumbled in his chest.  
  
It was the way he'd said his name as they kissed. It sounded like don't go yet. But Adam slipped out of his hands and walked into the main room.   
  
Gansey and Blue walked in holding hands. Blue was sporting a clean strip of gauze over her eyebrow and holding a few bags of fast food.   
  
"Everything good?" Adam asked, keeping the shake out of his voice.   
  
"Yep. A few quick stitches. In and out," she answered.  
  
They both looked like they were glowing. Happy, relieved. Adam tried to look the same because he was happy. He was stupidly happy that Gansey was okay. He couldn't begin to conceive of a world without him. It wasn't their fault he was being crushed under the weight of what had happened. It wasn't their parents who had been torn to shreds. It wasn't them possessed, turned into a monster.   
  
"Looking kickass, Sargent." Ronan strode out of the bathroom, and walked past Adam without looking at him.   
  
They all piled onto Gansey's bed, scarfed down burgers and fries. Adam couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten. Could it really have been the buns at the Barns?   
  
They told them Henry had gone back to Litchfield to hold down the fort there. They laughed and sat together in the comfortable silence, rejoicing in Gansey's presence.   
  
"I'd like to thank you all," Gansey said sleepily, his head in Blue’s lap. "For everything. For following me on this mad chase, for setting aside your own safety, for saving me. I shouldn't have asked you to sacrifice so much."   
  
"You didn't have to," Adam said.  
  
Despite everything, he was sure if he could go back to the beginning, he would still accept Gansey's friendship. To have these people in his life was worth the suffering he had endured.   
  
Gansey fell headlong into sleep soon after. Blue brushed her fingers through his hair and slumped down a bit as well.   
  
"Are you guys okay?" she asked softly.  
  
Adam laid back and looked at the rafters high above them.   
  
"Yeah," he lied.   
  
"Fucking fantastic." Ronan added, sarcasm dripping.  
  
Blue stretched out carefully so as not to wake Gansey and laid her legs across Ronan's lap.   
  
"He's alive," she whispered and they chuckled softly with the trueness, the rightness of it. This force that had collected them all in its gravity, had started them all on this insane quest, had awoken magic in a world of dust loneliness. That had awoken love in Blue and tethered Ronan to the earth when he'd lost his father and been exiled from his home.  
  
They all owed him a great deal. It was a debt that couldn't be measured and paid in money and something in that notion comforted Adam as his weighty eyes closed. He could pay a debt that was owed in loyalty, that was owed in friendship and support. Things a few years ago he didn't even think he deserved. 


	3. Chapter 3

Something kicked the leg Adam had dangling off the bed. He didn't open his eyes right away. He'd fallen into a thin dreamless sleep and he didn't want to lose it. He was kicked again, harder this time.   
  
Adam opened his eyes to see Ronan standing before him in the moonlight, nudging him with the toe of his boot.   
  
"Wake the fuck up, Parrish."   
  
"I'm up." Adam sat upright and turned to find Gansey and Blue both soundly asleep in each other's arms. The moonlight streamed through the windows and cascaded across the bed. It was a pretty picture.   
  
"You can stay here, but I wouldn't want to get accidentally fondled when one of them wakes up."   
  
"Asshole."  
  
Adam gingerly pushed himself off the bed. Sleeping in Noah's room didn't seem like an option so he stopped before the door and looked around. The couch would be fine.   
  
"Get your ass in here," Ronan said, rolling his eyes before he disappeared into his bedroom. Adam followed.   
  
Ronan slung his headphones around his neck and dropped down on the left side of the bed. It was rare for any of them to get a glimpse inside Ronan's room and there Adam was, invited in. He found himself wanting to walk around and peruse every knickknack, every dream thing like he'd done at the Barns.  
  
He felt that seeing Ronan's old room helped him to analyze, to understand who he'd been before his life was ripped apart. This room would then be a study in who Ronan had become, dark and full of messy piles of dangerous things.  
  
Adam knew that people's rooms were a reflection of who they were inside. Blue's room was unabashedly creative, unapologetically colorful, handmade and unique. Gansey's room was open and daring, a haven for history and study. And Noah. Noah's room had been untouched, a shadow of what it could have been.  
  
The most important asset of Adam’s room was that he paid for it himself. But it wasn't really his. He couldn't hang things from the walls or carve his name onto the floor like Ronan had done. It wasn't his own, but at least it was away from the trailer park and that was a start.   
  
He collapsed on the bed beside Ronan, a waft of his body wash enveloping Adam. He found his eyes falling closed and breathing it in. He was so tired.   
  
"Go to sleep, Parrish," Ronan said.  
  
Adam went to sleep.   
  
•••  
  
Adam was walking through the halls of Aglionby. From the looks of things, it was the end of third period. The bell rang two minutes late, as always and Adam rolled his eyes. Students began to pour out into the hallway and as they walked by Adam they stared at him. They whispered to each other and pointed at him.  
  
They hadn't done that for years, since before a strange boy named Gansey decided to befriend him. But Gansey wasn't there now. He was an island, alone in the middle of the hallway and the others streamed around him, gawking, snickering.   
  
"Nice outfit, loser!" One of the faceless students called.  
  
Adam looked down to find he was wearing his coveralls from work. They were filthy with oil and grease. Adam felt embarrassment clench him and he bolted for his locker. His uniform had to be in there. They couldn't see him this way. He had worked so hard to keep his struggle out of these halls. They could see the trailer park on him still.   
  
But as soon as Adam reached his locker, the halls vanished of students and the light flickered out. He whirled around looking for a sign of where they'd gone. He was utterly alone. And then he heard it. The distant sound of something gasping for breath. The pained sound of something struggling. He knew the source at once. He would never forget it.   
  
"Ronan?"   
  
He took off running in the direction of the terrible sound. It grew louder when he reached their Latin classroom. Ronan's choked breaths went through him.  
  
"Ronan!"   
  
The door was locked. Adam threw his body into it.   
  
"Ronan!"   
  
He barreled into it again and it gave. Adam stumbled through the door and found himself in the cramped darkened room he used to sleep in at the trailer park.  
His father had Ronan jacked up against the wall, his meaty hands wrapped around Ronan's throat. Black blood was running from Ronan's nose. He was dying. Again.   
  
When Adam lunged for his father, he suddenly switched places with him. His hands were squeezing Ronan's neck. Ronan looked to him, blood vessels bursting beside the cool blue irises but he didn't fight. Ronan didn't punch Adam as he had done his father. He didn't scrape Adams face or pry his hands away. He just died.  
Adams hands released him. Their job was finished. The dreamer was dead. Ronan slumped down the wall, utterly gone.   
  
"Oh my god. No! No, no, no..." Adam screamed, shaking Ronan's shoulders.   
  
"Adam."   
  
"Wake up," Adam sobbed.   
  
"Adam!" The shout shattered the dream. A hand grabbed hold of his and hoisted him out. 


	4. Chapter 4

Ronan didn't plan on sleeping. Even though his eyes were aching and every time he blinked it felt like he was about take a single step over a cliff and fall forever. He couldn't dream.  
  
He knew he wouldn't have to relive seeing his mother's mutilated body. Cabeswater had folded in on itself when it sacrificed everything to bring Gansey back. There was no body left to see. There was no Cabeswater to go back to. He didn't know what to expect when he finally let go. But he knew there would be nightmares. His head was minefield right now, a twisted portrait of his misery, of his agony, his loss. He couldn't disappear into that. Not yet. He wouldn't be in control. God knows what the fuck he'd bring back.   
  
Adam slept beside him, deep and unmoving in his bed and that felt about as close to peace as Ronan could imagine for himself right now.   
  
The music thumped and blared in his ears and he closed his eyes as he had done the night before in the BMW. He found that place between awake and asleep where he could balance on a razor's edge. His thoughts were streamlining and it made them less sharp. Each though floated easily on by to make room for the next. They came and went without consequence, without slicing him open like they did when he was awake.   
  
When he was awake he wanted to wring his hands on the steering wheel until they broke and bled. He wanted to set something important ablaze. He wanted to put his fist thought something. Anything to feel that sweet nothing, that absence of pain, of grief.   
  
Sitting propped up in his bed hovering around the edges of consciousness was relieving and he would've been happy to do it every night for the foreseeable future if only it was sustainable. If only it was actually sleep. But it wasn't and he could already feel it taking its toll, wreaking havoc on his body and his mind when he was awake.   
  
He thought about his mom. What Declan and Matthew would say when he would tell them she was gone. He thought about how it was his fault she was in Cabeswater in the first place. He thought about Adam in his arms, washing the shit off his face and then squirming away horrified when he saw Ronan's neck. He thought about kissing Adam again. He thought about his father and what he would say to him if he were alive. He thought about Gansey lying dead in the grass. He thought about Gansey waking up and how alive he was. He thought about feeling Cabeswater wink out like a star in the sky. He thought about where Noah had gone. He thought-  
  
Ronan was jerked out of his haze. Music flooded back into his awareness and he looked down at Adam. He had twitched wildly beside Ronan, eyes were pinched closed.    
  
"Ronan." Adam's lips formed his name painfully. Ronan pulled off his headphones.   
  
"Ohmygodnonono..." Adam groaned, his hands curled into tight fists over his face. Ronan recognized a nightmare when he saw one.   
  
"Adam," he said, grabbing his shoulder, shaking Adam out of the dream’s clutches. Adam began to sob in earnest now, mumbling nononono. Ronan's heart seized up.   
  
"Adam!" He all but shouted in Adam's good ear, leaning over him. Ronan pried one of his hands open and fit his inside.   
  
"Adam!"  
  
He squeezed and Adam drew in a sharp breath as his eyes flew open in horrified shock. His breath came in sharp pants.   
  
"Ronan," he whispered, reaching his fingers to Ronan's chest as if to make sure he was really there. Under Adam's fingers, Ronan's heart sputtered and stalled.  
"Oh, God. I was my dad."  
  
There it was. In being possessed by the demon he had lived out his darkest fear, becoming the monster his shitface father was.   
  
"I was hurting you," Adam choked out, unraveling. "I was trying so hard to stop."   
  
"I know." Ronan placed a hand over Adam's cheek, brushing a tear away with his thumb. "It wasn't you, Adam."   
  
Adam unfurled himself slightly and looked into Ronan's eyes. "You almost died."  
  
"I'm fine, Parrish." Ronan said again, but this time there was no bite in his words. The sight of Adam lost in the snares of a nightmare about him had been far worse than being unmade. He had decided a long time ago that there wasn't much he wouldn't do to keep Adam Parrish happy.   
  
"Stop saying that. I know you're not."    
  
Ronan wasn't a liar. But he was very talented at side-stepping and evading the entire truth. Something he had inherited from his father.  
  
In the physical sense, he was fine. Maybe a little headache, and a twinge of pain when he swallowed but who gave a shit about that. He'd had much worse. No, his problems were currently running much deeper than the physical, hidden, festering, sticking to his soul like tar.   
  
He wasn't going to lie to Adam so he leaned in and kissed the tears off his face. When a sigh left Adam's mouth, Ronan moved to his lips and kissed them gently, quietly, prayerfully, the way he had in his dreams for months, until Adam's body began to respond. His arm came around Ronan's back, pulling him closer. His lips began to respond with hunger. Adam grabbed a fistful of his shirt and Ronan was done.   
  
He gave over entirely to Adam, to the physical sensation of their bodies pressed together. His mind went blissfully quiet except for Adam Adam Adam   
  
Adam's lips moved across Ronan's jaw and gingerly, carefully placed soft kisses on Ronan's neck. A chaste kiss for every bruise. Each one said I'm sorry.   
  
"It's okay," Ronan sighed, his head thrown back, tangling his fingers in Adam's hair. His heart was crashing over and over into his ribs. A groan loosed itself from Ronan's throat and Adam drew up to look at him. His breathing was heavy, raw want in his eyes.   
  
They were both desperate, they were ravaged by loss, they were months of shared glances, shared secrets tightly compressed by tragedy, by violence and magic and near death.   
  
And then Adam sprang free. 


	5. Chapter 5

Before Adam understood what he was doing, he was on top of Ronan.    
  
One minute he was trapped in a nightmare, all of his fears playing out on his mind for sport. The next minute he found Ronan alive, awake, brushing and kissing his tears away with the bluntness he'd come to expect from Ronan and gentleness he hadn't thought existed until a few weeks before.   
  
Adam’s blood pulsed, thrumming madly throughout his body, demanding more. Every kiss was a salve on his wounded soul, lifted him away from the events of the past few days and left his mind somewhere blissful and relaxed. Somewhere like the Barns. Somewhere like Cabeswater. Somewhere like Ronan.   
  
He didn't try to examine what these desires meant, didn't try to painstakingly untie the complicated knot that was his sexuality. There was too much of Ronan for that right now. Too much pleasure, too much pain to ease.   
  
"Fuck," Ronan's voice was breathless, uncontrolled.  
  
The sound made Adams hips buck against Ronan's. The movement sent a shock of pleasure through him and he watched Ronan's eyes set, the way they did in the milliseconds before the light flickered from red to green, the way they did before he fell into his dreams when he knew he'd create something big. In a stolen flash of a moment, Ronan tugged off Adams shirt and twisted them roughly to switch positions.   
  
Ronan allowed himself the briefest of moments to look at Adams bare chest and shook his head slightly as if fighting the urge to swear again. He dipped quickly to drop a kiss on Adam’s collarbone, then returned to his mouth.   
  
Adam clawed at Ronan's black tank until it was thrown across the room, lead only by feeling, only by what felt right. And Ronan staring down at him starving and in awe, the sharp, lethally handsome panes of his face coated in moonlight was right.   
  
Adam felt something take root inside himself then. He recognized it at once as knowledge, as a revelation, as he excelled at perusing the former and conjuring the latter. But his thoughts were too addled to sit with it and puzzle it out at the moment. For once Adam knew what he wanted.   
  
He wanted. He was alive with want.   
  
Their chests were pressed so tightly together Adam felt sure their hearts could feel each other. Ronan's hips ground over his. Adam could feel Ronan's erection grind along his and he was almost undone right there.   
  
Ronan's hands brushed up his bare rib cage, gripping under his shoulder blade, anchoring them both to each other, to the earth. Their hips working in synchrony, Ronan's breath fast and warm on his neck.  
  
With his head buried in Adam’s neck, Ronan came. The unholy gasping on Adam’s skin started to send him over the edge he'd been unskillfully balancing on and then he felt Ronan pulse along the length of him as he came and that was it.  
  
Adam Parrish came whispering Ronan's name in a broken, undone way, gripping the muscles in his shoulders and thinking of that little revelation in his chest that seemed to be blossoming exponentially by the second. 


	6. Chapter 6

"What's the end game here, Lynch?" Adam asked him, tugging on a pair of Ronan’s black boxer briefs.  
  
Their old clothes were discarded in a pile in the corner of the room. Ronan looked on them with a fond and smug smile before settling back on the bed.   
  
"You never sleep again?"   
  
"Sounds good," Ronan replied, pulling on his head phones and propping himself up the way he had before Adam had his nightmare.  
  
Ronan’s brain was over exposed, blown open with light, riding the aftershocks of the pleasure they had shared. Adam fell in beside him and Ronan let his eyes fall on his tanned and freckled chest, thin and lean.  
  
There were thoughts of I can't believe that just happened. I wanted this for so long. How did I get so fucking lucky? But Ronan kicked them away because they were easily trailed by thoughts of Gansey's dead body, Noah's absence, his mother. His mother... and all the ways he'd been so incredibly unfuckinglucky.  
  
So he just let himself look at Adam. Adam caught him and smirked in a self-satisfied sort of way as he closed his eyes.   
  
"Just wake me if you need me," he said, his voice already wasting away into sleep.   
  
And Ronan watched Adam fall asleep almost immediately, twitching lightly and when he was satisfied he was out, Ronan let his eyes fall closed too and return to that grey state of unsleep, to the river of thoughts rushing by and nothingness. 

•••

"I'm going to D.C.," Ronan said a few minutes after Adam woke in his bed the following morning.   
  
Adam looked at him after he said this and Ronan could see the cogs whirring in his mind. As he analyzed and processed and Ronan figured this was another weighty contribution to Adam's constant fatigue. Forget the jobs he worked and the homework he slaved over, thinking that way, constantly weighing options and outcomes against each other must've been exhausting.  
  
Ronan didn't run like that. When he had an impulse he carried it out. When he wanted something, he grabbed it. The past few months, he was trying to be more mindful about the consequence this had on other people he cared about.   
  
"I'll drive," Adam said finally and the answer was so different than he'd expected that Ronan almost laughed. Instead he arched a brow.   
  
"You're not coming."   
  
"Ronan, you haven't slept in two days."   
  
"And?"  
  
Adam rolled his eyes, tugging on one of Ronan's shirts.   
  
"Don't be impossible."  
  
But Ronan didn't think he was. He was the most awake in his car, flying down the road, the engine vibrating around him, the steering wheel claimed in his hands. Adam couldn't come with him for a thousand reasons. He had school and work. Hopefully he still had jobs to return to after being absent the past few days. Ronan couldn't ask him to forfeit everything he'd worked for because he was a little fucking tired. He'd gone longer without sleep before. And besides, the news Ronan was carrying to D.C. Had to be borne between the three Lynch brothers alone. Ronan tugged on his jacket and shoved his feet into his boots.   
  
"I'll be back in a few days," Ronan said and looked at Adam.   
  
"Fine," Adam spat and it sounded a lot like don't get yourself killed.   
  
Ronan wanted to walk over and kiss him but Adam was fuming and they were too good at getting into fights. So he snatched his keys off the dresser and walked out.   
  
He went into Noah's room to find Orphan Girl a small round lump under the covers. He ignored the sting of pain at entering Noah's room for the first time in weeks.  
  
He'd always given Noah shit about the unimaginative state of his room. That was before everything started.   
  
"Get up, runt. We're going for a drive."  
  
He poked her and she snapped her teeth at his finger.   
  
"Kerah," she whined in protest but emerged from her little nest.  
  
Ronan squatted down in front of her and checked her nose and ears, looked into her odd eyes for any lingering effects of yesterday. Of being unmade. He found nothing but knew he'd be inspecting Matthew the same way in a few hours just to be sure.   
  
"How do you feel?" He asked and she swore at him. "Yeah, that's about right."  
  
He hauled her over his shoulder when she wouldn't get up on her own and marched toward the door.   
  
Gansey was awake sitting beside the bed with an enormous book in his lap. Blue was still sleeping in his bed, tangled up in the sheets, her short limbs flung wildly out like a star. Gansey looked up to Ronan over the tops of his wire frames.  
  
He's alive, Ronan thought. And still himself. And the thought made Ronan breathe easier for a minute.   
  
"D.C." Ronan whispered the answer to the question in Gansey's eyes. He nodded and swallowed, his brow furrowing as if trying to piece together exactly what to say.  
  
Ronan didn't want to hear I'm sorry for your loss. He didn't want to hear it's not fair. He didn't want to hear that it would be all right. All of it was bullshit and gansey knew it.  
  
So he said, "Just be careful, okay?"  
  
Ronan arched a brow to say I'm always careful. And Gansey shook his head and almost laughed. Ronan started for the door again and Chainsaw sailed through the room to perch herself on his shoulder.   
  
"Ronan," Gansey's voice stopped him before he hit the stairs. He didn't have to change volume. Ronan was sure he'd hear Gansey miles away now. "Use your damn phone, will you?" 


	7. Chapter 7

Adam pulled up to Boyd's and took a deep breath before going in. He'd constructed a solid lie to cover why he'd missed yesterday's shift at the garage.  
  
He couldn't believe it was only Sunday. It seemed impossible that so few hours had passed since he'd gone into that terrible dream with Ronan, since they found Gansey alone under the earth, since they found Glendower’s bones, since the demon held him captive and unmade Ronan. They were all inexplicably different. They had all become something more so fast. It seemed ridiculous to be sitting in front of the old garage rehearsing his mundane lie. He got out of the car.   
  
Boyd was bent over the engine of a Chevy pickup. A popular choice in this town. American made, meant for hauling a load, doing a job, built for rough roads. There was something in Adam could identify with in a truck like this, but nothing he actually liked about himself.   
  
"Sir," Adam announced himself and Boyd jumped.   
  
"Christ, kid. You almost gave me a heart attack."   
  
"I'm sorry, sir. I wanted to come in and apologize for not showing up for my shift yesterday."   
  
Adam had thought about saying he'd had a family emergency because it felt the most true to what had happened, but Boyd had caught wind of what happened between him and his parents months ago and Adam didn't want him to get suspicious.   
  
"I had to-"   
  
"Kid," Boyd held up a grease smeared hand, gnarled as bark. "In two years you've never shown up late to a shift, never called out or done a half ass job. That's heaps more than I can say about any of the other lazy ingrates at that school of yours. You don't have to explain yourself. If you weren't here I know it was for a good reason."  
  
Adam exhaled. "Thank you, sir." Boyd clapped him on the back.   
  
"You're a good kid."  
  
This was pointed and Adam understood the unspoken last half of the sentiment: no matter what you've been taught to believe.   
  
Adam dropped his gaze. He swallowed the lump in his throat.   
  
"What d'ya say? Wanna work a few hours today to make up for yesterday?"   
  
"That would be great," Adam said and went to grab the coveralls from the Hondayota.  
  
He disappeared below a Ford Escape examining the suspension, happy to focus his energy on labor instead of wondering in Ronan had made it to D.C. without falling asleep at the wheel. He felt glad for the cover of the SUV over his head because thinking of Ronan recently brought a faint blush to his cheeks. His thoughts fluttered to the night before and he had to reign them in when he became hard immediately.   
  
He was torn between attraction - so new and foreign that it felt dangerous, like a long dark road with no stop light- and fury that was so familiar it seemed inseparable from Ronan. It was every fight they'd ever had, every stubborn stance, every careless comment. Attraction and anger: the razor thin line he'd been walking with Ronan for months without realizing it.   
  
Boyd's phone rang and Adam dragged himself out from under the car to answer it.   
  
"Boyd's, garage" Adam answered.   
  
"It's Gansey," Adam couldn't help but thrill at the sound of his best friend’s voice. So far away from death, tinged with all its usual color. "I wanted to let you know Ronan texted me and he made it to Declan's."   
  
Adam loosed a shaky breath.   
  
"He texted you that?" He asked, amazed Ronan deigned to use his phone.   
  
"Well, his exact words were 'tell Parrish I'm not dead in a ditch. You know what that's like, dick.'"   
  
"Jesus." Adam huffed. "Can you tell him I said he's an asshole?"   
  
"With pleasure. So, I'm going over to try to convince my mother that I'm not the worst son that has ever lived. If Helen doesn't eat me alive would you want to meet at Nino's at seven?"   
  
Nino's. It seemed surreal that places like that could still exist after everything.   
  
"I'll be there," he said.   
  
"Good man. And Adam- you're okay?"  
  
"I'm all right," Adam said because he wasn't Ronan and lying wasn't against his moral code. "See you tonight."   
  
He hung up and slid back under the car, unable to keep a smirk from his face thinking of Ronan's text. Then he let his cluttered mind get lost in the intricacies of the chassis above him.   
  
Later at Nino's he, Blue, Gansey and Henry shared an enormous pepperoni and onion pie. Blue and Gansey sat in the same side of the booth holding hands and Adam found himself grateful for Henry's odd new presence.  
  
He'd been thrust into their quest far too quickly, folded into their group without Adam realizing it and that unnerved him. Ronan was accounted for but Henry's place in the booth made it slightly less obvious that another one of them was missing. And he'd helped to find Gansey when they needed him. Adam couldn't stay closed to him forever, especially because he was undeniably one of them. Already. And there was no contesting that.  
  
Henry understood Gansey on a level that took Adam months to puzzle out. He charmed Blue which was a mystery by itself. And he made Adam feel equal by his own sense of displacement. Henry too had been searching for something more, for family among the halls of Aglionby.   
  
They didn't speak of Glendower. Adam was sure that if Gansey hadn't kissed Blue and sacrificed himself to the demon, finding Glendower to be nothing more than dust and bones would have killed him.   
  
Gansey would talk about it when he was ready. Probably when the relief of being alive wore off slightly. For now, they laughed and joked and stuffed themselves with pizza.   
  
"Back to Fox Way?" Gansey asked Blue as they waved goodbye to Henry's Fisker. "I don't think your mom is going to let you spend the night now that my life has been out of immediate danger for twenty-four hours."   
  
"Probably not," Blue agreed. "Plus, it's a school night." Adam smirked at this.   
  
They all stared off down the darkened road feeling the absurdity of returning to their classes the next day.   
  
"I'll see you tomorrow," Gansey bumped fists with Adam and he and Blue walked toward the Camaro, arm in arm.   
  
Any lingering jealousy he might have felt at the show of affection had shriveled up and blown away the night he kissed Ronan at the Barnes.   
  
He climbed into his patchwork car and drove to St. Agnes to drop into his bed and get enough sleep to tackle the impossible normalcy of the next day. 


	8. Chapter 8

Adam was woken from a dreamless sleep by his alarm. He'd feared the nightmare would drag him under again, but then he remembered what had happened the last time he woke up and ended up falling asleep with a smile on his face instead.   
  
He made it through his first few classes without Gansey with relative ease. It was second nature for Adam to focus himself into his school work. Achieving here, earning good grades had been his only feasible path to escape for so long. He took unnecessarily diligent notes, keeping himself present during the lectures and raising his hand whenever the opportunity to answer arose. It was an anchor, a tether to keep him from floating away.   
  
He met Gansey on the way to their calculus class across campus. The day was chilled with autumn and the sweet decaying smell of browning leaves caught Adam as they walked. His heart sagged heavily in his chest. It remembered Cabeswater's leaves brushing against his mind. It mourned the loss.   
  
Cabeswater had been a burden but it had been his burden. It had given him purpose. It had protected him, saved him. It had made him worthy, made him special like the rest of them. What was he now without it? Just a boy who remembered the kiss of vines on his arms, the pulse of the ley line in his veins. Now, there was emptiness.   
  
They sat down in class and Adam let himself feel it for the first time since Cabeswater died, the nothingness where it had inhabited Adam’s soul.   
  
"Adam," Gansey whispered from the desk beside him.  
  
And Adam realized his hands were balled into fists over his notebook and he was staring out the window with tears in his eyes.  
  
What's going on? Gansey's eyes asked.   
  
Adam shook his head and forced himself to relax.  
  
The hour mercilessly dragged on and Adam was hardly aware of what their teacher had said. He'd pay for later, but in that moment all he needed was relief from the devouring black hole of this loss, he needed answers.  
  
When that ridiculous bell rang two minutes late Adam turned to Gansey who was already waiting, ready to give his friend guidance.   
  
"I need to go to Fox Way."   
  
***

"Hello magician."  
  
Calla opened the door before Adam could knock. He was way beyond the point of being surprised by their ability to peer into the future.   
  
"Not anymore," he replied. "Didn't you hear?"   
  
She narrowed her dark eyes at him. "So dramatic."  
  
She turned her back and went inside. Adam followed. The house was a familiar swath of warm air and sage burning. Of layered women's voices and faint Joni Mitchell and a tea kettle screaming. It provided comfort and also a swelling of dull pain. He missed Persephone.    
  
Calla led him to the kitchen and pushed him to sit in a chair at the table.   
  
"Adam, how are you?" Maura asked, taking the kettle off the stove.   
  
"Fine, ma'am."   
  
Calla scoffed.   
  
"Don't call me ma'am and don't lie in a house full of psychics." Maura said kindly opening a container of loose leaf tea. Calla stilled her hand before she reached in.   
  
"No, give him this one."  
  
Calla passed a little wooden box. Maura nodded, agreeing. Maura put the mug down in front of Adam and they sat on either side of him. He felt like he was being interviewed or sized up for a meal. Weighed and measured, read and reread. He was familiar with quiet analyzing so he could hardly begrudge them.   
  
"What's this one do?" He asked taking the mug in his hands.   
  
"Turns you into a dog," Calla said, picking at her nails.  
  
She and Ronan were so similar it was no wonder they were always at each other's throats. Four walls and a roof were barely enough to contain Ronan Lynch on his own, never mind two of them. Adam wondered what life had stolen from Calla to make her as hard as Ronan.   
  
"It's good for calming after a stressful event. I gave Blue some this morning. It helps."   
  
Adam took a sip and almost choked. It was bitter and dry but he could feel it's warmth sinking behind his sternum and spread across his chest. He sat back in his chair, his muscles uncoiling.   
  
"Although with that snake around I don't think you really need the tea to relax," Calla said and only then did Adam realize she was touching his elbow with one long finger, reading his past, his thoughts, his heart without permission. She winked at him and he felt blush creep up to his cheeks.   
  
"He wants to know what happens to him now that Cabeswater's dead."   
  
"Calla," Maura warned.   
  
"What? I'm just cutting to the chase."   
  
"Finish your tea, Adam and then we'll do a reading."   
  
Adam gulped it down, eager to hear what the cards had to say. Even if they confirmed his fears and there was nothing special left inside him. Even if it was just dust and a stubborn will to survive. He had to know.   
  
They went into the reading room and like always Adam felt as though he entered a vacuum. Regular time didn't exist in this space. The noisy chaos of Fox Way was blotted out to silence when the door closed. Adam sat in Persephone's chair even though Calla raised an eyebrow at him. He didn't care, for a second he swore he could hear her light voice humming his deaf ear.   
  
Maura laid her deck in front of Adam and he deftly shuffled them. With a lithe swipe of her hand, she fanned them out before him.   
  
"Pick three."   
  
He did and turned them over, his breath stuck in his throat. The two of cups. The six of Wands. The magician.  
  
He looked up to the two women, waiting. Only he found them staring back at him, waiting too.   
  
"Well?" Calla asked.   
  
"Well what?"   
  
"Don't act like you've never used these before. Go ahead."  
  
Of course he'd used them before, just a few days ago Persephone's deck felt so right in his hand that he'd rather lose a limb than give them up. But that had been for Cabeswater. He'd used the cards to interpret its needs, to be its voice, to heal it, to act for it. He'd never done it for himself. Without the tendrils of vines and leaves that Cabeswater led through his mind, he didn't know how.   
  
He stared down at the cards, each familiar but foreign. He'd seen their faces but didn't speak the same language anymore.   
  
"Relax, Adam. Don't try so hard." Maura said.   
  
Relax. Adam could barely conceptualize the word. He'd been on guard since the day his father had hit him for the first time and he hadn't unwound since.   
  
"Maybe another cup of tea?" Maura asked Calla and her voice sounded far away even in his good ear.   
  
"Or we could just call the snake." Calla said and Adam could hear the wicked smile on her lips.   
  
Ronan.   
  
Adam looked down at the first card and put his finger on it.   
  
"Two of cups. It's a relationship card, right? Two people..."   
  
"Soulmates," Maura clarified and now her voice was wearing a smile too.   
  
"The strength of the card, of the relationship depends upon the strength of the people involved," Adam said, unsure of where the words had sprouted from.   
  
"You're pretty strong, aren't you kid?"  
  
He looked at Calla and nodded firmly. He might not have agreed a year or two ago. In the shadow of his father, he had been nothing, a paper flower torn and crushed over and over again without a second thought. But after Gansey and Blue, after Cabeswater, after Ronan, he'd grown thorns.   
  
"And that snake of yours, he's strong too."   
  
Adam nodded again, something like pride swelled in his chest. There was no doubting that Ronan was strength embodied. Or maybe it was all of his weaknesses that added up to a particular strength.   
  
She sat back in her seat and waved her hands lazily as if to say, well, there you go.   
  
"Next," Maura instructed.  
  
Adam moved his finger to the second card and felt it humming under his fingerprint.   
  
"The six of wands. Balance... something's been overcome and now there's a sense of...release."  
  
Again, he wasn't sure where the words came from, he just knew they were true. The rightness of them rang in his soul like a bell. He felt the card sing to him, revealing its nature.   
  
"Time to let yourself rest and enjoy in the victory," Maura said, softly, kindly, the voice of a mother easing a child to sleep. "It's over now, Adam."   
  
He moved his finger to the third card and he swore he heard Persephone's voice whisper, you.   
  
"The magician," he said.   
  
"Do we really need to spell that one out for you?" Calla asked.  
  
Adam shook his head. He knew it. He knew it like he knew his reflection.   
  
"Just because Cabeswater is gone doesn't mean you are too." Maura began. "When you stood in that forest and made that bargain, it tailored its magic to you, to what was already inside of you. It woke up every scrap of magic inside you and used it. If someone else had stood in your place, the bargain would've turned out differently. You can't shut that off, Adam. You can't turn off the tap of your magic, of who you are."   
  
Adam was breathless.  
  
An old, poisonous voice that had been growing steadier quieter in his head for months said: They're wrong. You're nothing. Why would your father have hurt you if weren't?   
  
But it was so easy to silence. That's why Persephone had wanted him to replace her. He was like them. The realization made him full, made his skin hum.   
  
"Listen, I know Persephone liked you so you can't be all bad. Or you're just as bat shit as she was-" Calla was interrupted by Maura.  
  
"Either way, when you need help or guidance our door is always open."  
  
"But I'm leaving..." Adam's brain was still so stuffed with joy, sighing with relief that the mantra he'd been repeating to himself for years came tumbling out.   
  
He had once repeated the words over and over until they stretched and bound him, holding him together every time his father hit him. They had been a warning every time he looked at Ronan and started to see him more clearly. He was going to college. He'd had a plan.   
  
Calla snorted.   
  
"Before you had no reason to stay," Maura said thoughtfully, her eyes almost looking through him. "But so much has changed."  
  
"The snake," Calla said, annoyed.   
  
"More than that. It's them. all of them. They're all different now. Adam," Her eyes came back into focus as she reached for his hand. "You can still have the life you always wanted without abandoning everything know."   
  
He nodded and now knew she was right. 


	9. Chapter 9

It had grown dark outside the garage in the hours since Boyd had packed up and headed home, leaving Adam to finish up. It was so dark that Adam thought it he stared out into the flat, crisp black he could scry. The mere fact that that possibility still existed for him made him smile as he slammed the hood of a Corolla shut. He unzipped his filthy coveralls halfway and tied the sleeves around his waist. It was time to head back to St. Agnes. He'd put it off long enough.   
  
As he wiped the grease from he hands, two lights aggressively burst through the darkness out in front of him. A slick dark BMW skidded to a vicious halt in the driveway beside his own car. Ronan Lynch, a sleepless, vengeful God, climbed out of the car and slammed the door shut with unnecessary force. He stalked into the garage, for Adam like a panther, and Adam stood his ground.  
  
He wasn't afraid of Ronan. He had never been. Frustrated by him, in awe of him, confused by him, turned on by him. But not scared. Adam knew what Ronan looked like when he wasn't performing. It was hard to be afraid of that person. The one that loved his brother, the one who nursed a baby Raven, the one who looked at Adam like he was worth a damn.   
  
"Holy shit, Parrish," Ronan said in a dark low voice, his eyes raking over Adam shamelessly before pinning him against the Corolla.   
  
They came together like thunderclouds, crashing, clinging. Lips exploring, hands grabbing, pulling. Ronan's knee parted Adams legs and Adam's hips bucked forward without asking permission. Ronan's lips dropped down to the light stubble at Adams jaw and brushed along his neck, painfully soft and teasing. In seconds, Adam's body had gone from exhausted to aflame.   
  
Ronan had kick started something inside him. Something he hadn't understood until they kissed.   
  
He half-heartedly pushed Ronan away. He stepped back a few inches and Adam almost stumbled forward with the loss of him.   
  
"Wait. Damn it," Adam breathed and hungrily watched Ronan scrub his hand over his head.  
  
Adam wanted to ask him how his brothers were. How they took the news about his mother. If he was okay. But he saw the deep purple smudges underneath Ronan's light eyes and his questions overshadowed by them.   
  
"You still haven't slept?" Adam asked, incredulous.  
  
"Don't make a federal fucking case out of it." The twin marks of sleeplessness almost matched the bruises slowly fading from his neck.   
  
"Ronan. How long can you keep this up?"  
  
"Relax, Parrish." Ronan said, about to turn away. Adam's hand reached out and caught his forearm. Ronan looked down at his hand and his mouth split into a sharp smile. Adam yanked him back until their bodies collided once more. Ronan's fingers were tangled in his hair, palming the back of his head.   
  
Adam thought of the six of wands. How their fight was over and he could relax. He could enjoy the things that mattered to him. His friends, alive and relatively well, his freedom from his father, this newfound feeling swelling in his chest whenever he kissed Ronan.   
  
Adam's hands disappeared beneath the thick black leather of Ronan's jacket, his armor. He blissfully traced the hard cords of muscles that paralleled his spine.   
  
"Come back to the Barns with me," Ronan broke away and breathed into Adam's good ear.   
  
"Yes."  
  
For once in his life, Adam didn't have to think. He felt more like himself at the Barns than any home he'd ever been in. Like he could fit himself into its rolling pastures, it's secluded sleepiness, it's improbable inhabitants like a missing puzzle piece.   
  
Adam locked up the garage and climbed into the BMW.   
  
"Hey there," he said to Orphan Girl as they took off toward Singer's Falls.  
  
She was curled up in the backseat her eyes falling closed her head rested on a pile of napkins that looked like Ronan had grabbed from a fast food place. When she saw him, she smiled sleepily and reached out a little hand to him. He took it and gave it a squeeze before she curled it back into her chest.   
  
"She needs a name, you know," Adam said to Ronan.   
  
"Yeah, I've been trying out a few to see if we can find one she likes. Little shit, puke, brat."   
  
Adam smirked and rolled his eyes.   
  
They pulled down the shrouded drive, alit with Ronan's glowing fireflies and Adam felt peace. Deep in his bones like it had seeped in and replaced his marrow.   
  
He got out and scooped Orphan girl out of the backseat. She nuzzled her head into his t-shirt and his heart thrummed pleasantly. Chainsaw swooped majestically around the yard, a shadow passing over the glowing dream things. She landed on Ronan's shoulder a second before he pushed the front door open.   
  
They walked past the living room and Ronan turned to face the couch, undoubtedly remembering the last time they'd been there. Adam kicked him gently with the toe of his sneaker.   
  
"Come on," he whispered, nodding to the stairs.  
  
Ronan turned to him, the angular planes of his face less cruel here, his eyes soft, the hurt shining outward for a moment without the artifice of anger or indifference. He followed Adam up the stairs.   
  
Adam deposited Orphan Girl on Matthew’s bed and covered her over with a blanket. He took Ronan's hand and led him to his bedroom. He kicked off his coveralls, pulled off his t-shirt and laid down in Ronan's bed like he'd done it a thousand times before. Ronan watched him with careful scrutiny, his eyes slightly narrowed as if he were trying to decide if Adam was a dream or not.   
  
"Come on, Lynch. Don't make this ugly."   
  
Ronan's mouth pulled up into a vicious grin. But his eyes were soft. This was normal at the Barns. Every time they'd come here together over the past few months, Adam could see it. Ronan melting, just slightly. He was less likely to lash out in anger, to use his sharp tongue and stone fists to express himself. At Monmouth, at Aglionby he was dangerous, an animal forced into a cage, grieving and captive. But here he was a king returned to his domain. And there was no Ronan more powerful than Ronan in his rightful kingdom.   
  
He let his jacket slip off and fall with a profound thunk to the floor. He thrashed open his belt buckle like it had done something to personally offend him. He tugged the black tank over his shaved head and sat down on the edge of the bed, his back to Adam, tugging off his socks.   
  
Adam didn't bother trying to hide his physical reaction to the savagely beautiful sight of Ronan undressing. Their time for pretending, for concealing was dead.  
  
He reached out a hand and traced his fingers over the intricate lines of his tattoo. He watched the muscles in Ronan's back tighten and flex at his touch. Ronan let Adam ghost over the odd flowers, the beaks and claws, the thorns and roads. Adam could see his fingers sending shivers up Ronan's spine and he couldn't wait anymore.  
  
He dragged Ronan back onto the bed and swung a leg over him. Ronan's arms captured him, binding around his torso, pulling him ever closer. They kissed freely, deeply. Adams heart drummed wildly. He felt it's pulse all the way to his feet. Alive. Alive. Alive.  
  
He let himself perform every experiment his brain had concocted over the past few days. What would happen if he touched Ronan like this? How would it make him feel? Even more dangerous, how would it make Ronan feel.  
  
Adam skimmed his fingers down Ronan's ribcage, he slipped his hand around Ronan's head, his palm flush with the back of his neck. The skin there was burning and Adam drew him up into a kiss and another. He pulled away just enough to send his hand down the flat planes of Ronan's stomach to brush his cock over his boxers.  
  
When he closed his hand around Ronan, hard and full, an overwhelming swell of arousal surged inside Adam. He hadn't expected it to devastate him so euphorically. He felt powerful, he felt desirous, he felt like they would have fought a lot less if they'd done this sooner.  
  
Not gently, He dropped his forehead down onto Ronan's shoulder as he felt each one of his muscles tense.   
  
"Fuck," Ronan choked out.   
  
Adam’s body was moving faster than his mind, wanting more. His stroked his hand once, twice. Ronan moaned, but it wasn't enough. Adam clumsily shoved his hand inside his boxers while he lightly bit Ronan's neck. Adam let himself want, want, want.   
  
Ronan arched into him and Adam wrapped his hand around his naked cock.   
  
The sound Ronan made was unholy. Adam had to still his hips from grinding against him just so that sound didn't make him come right then.  
  
He gave a gentle stroke, the action familiar, but the context so wildly, unimaginably different than him quietly jerking himself off in whatever rare moment of free time he had when he wasn't ready to collapse with exhaustion.  
  
There was so much excess in this. In these new moments he and Ronan were creating, it frightened Adam to take so much. For so long he had only taken what he absolutely needed, and a lot of the time, not even that much. It was all he knew. He was still coming around to the idea that he might deserve more than that.   
  
It frightened him to give so much. He had almost nothing to spare. What if he ran out? He thought about the conversation he'd had with Gansey so long ago. Was love a right or a privilege? Could love be a bottomless well that never dried up? Everything he'd known in his life had told him that was a fantasy, movie bullshit. But now. After what he'd gone through with his friends... he didn't think what he felt for Gansey could ever be shut off, or Blue or Noah.   
  
Ronan pushed up into his hand and Adams thoughts were wiped away. He wanted to give Ronan relief, release, pleasure. He wanted to ease the guilt out of his muscles, make him forget even for a few minutes what haunted him.   
  
"God, Adam," Ronan moaned.  
  
Adam stroked and pumped his fist slowly at first and then faster as Ronan grasped at his back, as Adam watched his long fingers clench the sheets into his fist.   
  
The sight of Ronan unraveling beneath him was enough to push Adam over the edge. He supposed he had always found Ronan handsome in a painful way, sexy in a way that was sure to be lethal. Like looking at the sun, if Adam had stared too long, it wasn't going to end well for him. Even before he understood how Ronan felt about him. Even before he started to feel it himself.  
  
But that had been nothing. Ronan pressed along the length of Adams body, Ronan's lips on his, Ronan in his hand, this was the most turned on he'd ever been. He was awake. He was alive. They were magic, improbable, messy, terrifying. The only thing that kept Adam from coming was his attention to Ronan. The need to help him, to heal him.   
  
Adam brushed his thumb over the head of Ronan's cock, a habit his hand performed unconsciously because he liked it himself. Ronan bucked and pinched his eyes closed. Adam leaned down to kiss the tendrils of his tattoo that snaked over his shoulder and spread up his neck. He worked his hand in a steady rhythm and Ronan's head fell to the side, turning his brilliantly bright eyes on Adam. His eyebrows were furrowed toward each other, his face almost pleading, almost reverent, as if he couldn't believe what was happening.   
  
Adam quickly filed the face away as one of the best ones he'd ever seen Ronan make. Then he dragged his lips and teeth across Ronan's jaw and rested by his ear where he simply breathed, "Come."   
  
Ronan let out a sigh that crescendoed into a breathless moan as he came in Adam’s hand. His hips pushed up and his fists twisted around the bed sheet and Adams hair, knuckles white. Adam watched in wonder as Ronan pulsed in his hand, as cum shot up on their stomachs. Ronan rode out the end of his orgasm with ragged breaths and Adam’s name and a string of curse words falling from his lips.  
  
His head fell back to the pillow and Adam flopped down beside him, keeping his hand on Ronan's stomach. He watched Ronan’s breathing slow. He was wild and undone with the moonlight falling on his closed eyes.   
  
He looked to Adam and said nothing as he slipped his boxers the rest of the way off and wiped the mess off his stomach and Adam's before tossing them across the room. He drew Adam up into a kiss and then dragged a trail of them down his stomach. Shivers raced across Adam's skin. Ronan's fingers hooked around Adam's boxers and tugged.   
  
"No!" Adam gasped and Ronan looked up to him, dark brows furrowed, some emotion that was a distant cousin of hurt flashed in his eyes.   
  
"You don't have to," Adam clarified.  
  
Ronan was in pain. He had lost too much. He didn't need to give Adam a damned thing.   
  
"I didn't do that so you would- I don't expect- you don't owe me anything-"   
"Owe y- Jesus, Parrish are you done?"   
  
Adam threw him a withering look but didn't say anymore because Ronan's low voice was rumbling across the already taught muscles of his lower stomach. He felt his erection adamantly press against Ronan's chest.   
  
"I have been wanting to do this," Ronan said, his eyes sharp with desire, a look that sent an almost painful thrill up Adams spine. "For so long."   
  
Adam gave a minuscule nod, suddenly terrified as Ronan pulled his underwear down and his dick sprang free. Ronan loosed a small sigh before wrapping his hand around Adam and licking a stripe up the underside of him.   
  
Adam's back almost broke from arching off the bed. Ronan's hands pinned his hips back down and he took Adam into his mouth. A sound he'd never made before tore from Adam’s chest as he was enveloped in the wet heat of Ronan's mouth.   
  
"Oh my God," Adam gasped, spiraling into this absurd pleasure, clutching Ronan's shoulders, light popping behind his lids, fingers grazing Ronan's shorn hair. He knew he wasn’t going to last long after watching Ronan come just minutes before.  
  
Ronan's tongue flicked and dragged over the length of him and Adam was barely hanging on. Strong hands grounded him, dragged down his ribs, pressed into the muscles of his back.   
  
Ronan began to move his fist in time with his mouth.   
  
"Ronan- I'm-" he barely was able to choke out a warning.  
  
Ronan moaned around him in response and Adam came, blissfully, endlessly, entirely at Ronan's mercy. Every muscle seized, braced against the onslaught of pleasure then uncoiled itself in a wash of euphoria.  
  
Every time Cabeswater had protected him, saved him, terrified him, made him feel and believe in his own worth. They were but a precursor to this moment. His eyes were still squeezed shut as he felt Ronan swallow around him and ease away.   
  
Adam dropped his head and looked over when Ronan collapsed beside him one hand thrown over his head, the other draped over his chest.   
  
"Fuck," Adam said, his breath still coming in pants. "Fuck."  
  
Ronan chuckled wickedly and met his eyes. Adam saw something in their brilliant blue, something that snagged in his mind, that would worry there until he figured out. But it was gone as soon as Ronan leaned to kiss him messily. He stood up to grab Adam’s boxers and toss them onto bed. Adam watched him walk naked to the dresser and grab a pair for himself and Adam found himself amazed at the raw beauty of Ronan Lynch.   
  
He caught Adam staring and his mouth quirked, a cocky shit until the very end.   
  
"Come sleep, you asshole."


	10. Chapter 10

Ronan didn't have to wait long until he heard Adam’s breathing slow and deepen and then he opened his eyes.   
  
Adams face was serene, the graceful slope of his jaw stretched up into the pillow, his lips slightly parted. Ronan reached out a hand and pushed Adams hair away from his forehead. When he let go, it flopped right back into place and Ronan smirked.   
  
He gingerly slid out of bed, pulled on his jeans, shoved his feet into his boots and walked toward the door.   
  
He looked back at Adam, undisturbed. Adam in his bed. He shook his head, completely unclear about how he got so goddamn lucky.   
  
He'd made so many mistakes. He had been trying to make up for them, but he just kept fucking up. A sharp razor of pain sliced through his chest. His fists clenched and he turned away from Adam. Turned his back on the unfathomable brilliance of what they'd just done.   
  
He walked down the hall and passed in front of his parents' room. The picture of them smiled out at him from the darkness.   
  
The older Ronan got the more he looked like his father. It filled him with pride and longing to look in the mirror certain days and see glimpses of him. His mother was laughing in his father's arms and her smile made his stomach turn, made his hands remember the gore that had been the last time he saw her. Both of his parents had been butchered. His fault.   
  
He closed his eyes and felt sleep instantly tugging at him, begging to drag him down, to infect his mind, to shut down his body. He snapped his eyes open and kept walking.   
  
There was a scratching sound coming from Matthew's room and he followed it. Ronan found Orphan Girl wide awake and broken into a box Matthews colored pencils. She chewed idly on a blue one and was dragging the green one over Matthew's wall with wide strokes.   
  
"Jesus. You little puke," Ronan said, quiet so as not to wake Adam.  
  
She turned to him, a smile curving around the pencil ruined with bite marks.   
  
"Can you at least find some fucking paper?" He went to stand beside her. "What're you drawing?"   
  
She looked up to him, her strange eyes wide.   
  
"Cabeswater."   
  
Now that she'd said it, Ronan could almost make it out. A stringy cluster of circles for the lake, long crooked brown lines as high she could jump for the trees and a chaotic jumble of scribbles for the leaves.  
  
"It's gone. You know that."   
  
Ronan felt the razor tearing into his lungs. He couldn't believe she wanted to go back to Cabeswater after everything. He thought of her crying for help trying to put his mother back together. He drew in a sharp breath and close his eyes.  
  
Again, sleep flooded him immediately. Every blink was a siren song, a dark seduction to get what his body needed. He took a step forward to catch himself before he collapsed.   
  
"Kerah?" She whispered, frightened and slipped her little hand in his.   
  
"It's ok," he said but his voice sounded like he was underwater, slow and slurred. He needed to move.   
  
"Come on." They crept slowly down the stairs and Ronan buttoned her up into Matthew’s jacket from a few years ago that still hung near the door to the back porch. It hung almost to her hooves. He knelt down and cuffed the sleeves for her.   
  
"You should go back up," she said.   
  
"Mind your own business."  
  
He mussed her hair and pulled on a hoodie on as they went outside. He tugged a few plums off the tree by the porch that bore fruit all year long, peaches, plums, apples, whatever they had craved, it was there.   
  
He didn't need his ghost light because his fireflies and glowing flowers floated before them making a path to the cattle barn. He tossed the fruit to the doe and buck edging out of the forest at the sight of Ronan and Orphan girl.   
  
"You're gonna help me repaint that bedroom, brat." he said to her and she beared her teeth at him.   
  
"What about a name for you? You're not an orphan anymore. You've got me," he said and was sliced deeper by the thousand-pound realization that he was now an orphan himself.   
  
In truth, he'd been one for the past few years. Ever since the morning he found his father in the driveway, since his mother had fallen into her sleep. Ronan had looked after himself, or Gansey had, or he'd barely fucking made it... but he'd just gotten his mom back and now...  
  
He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Sleep was coming for him, claws out, ready to hook into him and bring him someplace that wasn't the Cabeswater he'd created, to make him relive everything, to hurt him. He was so tired it felt like it was going to kill him, but he couldn't go there.   
  
Ronan barely felt the ground swirl up and crash against his knees, bang into his palms.   
  
"Kerah!"  
  
Every muscle in his body begged him to collapse, to let go, to stop fighting. Orphan Girl was pulling on his sweatshirt, smacking the back of his neck and cawing like chainsaw when she was afraid. The sound sat Ronan back on his heels, feeling more drugged from sleep deprivation than any pill K had ever given him. He was so close to the ground. All he had to do was fall. But he rallied enough to pull her into his chest and she told him he was a stupid boy, that he should go back upstairs and sleep.   
  
"Don't tell me what to do," he grumbled. They made it to the barn and he let her down when his strength was spent.   
  
He walked in, past the rows of slumbering cows and Orphan Girl took time to pet each one's ears.   
  
Then she skittered on ahead of him and started rifling through his father's things, she jumped in and out of boxes, digging through their contents for anything she could chew.   
  
Ronan looked on the slumbering animals and thought of Matthew.  
  
He thought of the tears that had rushed to his eyes when he'd told his brothers about their mom. He'd spared them the details. There was no reason to subject Matthew to that. His little brother buried his head in his hands and turned away from them so they didn't see his tears. Declan immediately went on the attack.   
  
"Why the fuck didn't you tell me?" He'd screamed at Ronan, shoving him across the room.  
  
Ronan had felt that familiar heat rise in his chest but for once he didn't hit his brother back. Ronan knew the blame lay with him alone. He knew he'd given Matthew false hope and stolen Declan's chance to say goodbye.   
  
He'd tried to apologize to Declan, something he wasn't even sure he was capable of doing, but Declan went into politician mode, chattering stupidly about funeral arrangements, his jaw clenched, not meeting Ronan's eye.  
  
And it was somehow worse when Matthew let Ronan comfort him. He didn't deserve to have his brother in his arms weeping like a kid into his shoulder, trusting him implicitly even though it had been Ronan's idea to bring her to Cabeswater. It had been Ronan who wanted so badly for things to be exactly as they were that he put his family in danger. It had been so fucking stupid. And if he didn't do something Matthew would end up just like his mother, lifeless, mindless sitting in an empty house for the rest of his life, turned off. He couldn't let that happen.   
  
He got to his father's desk and closed his eyes on the events of the day before, closed them on his brothers sleeping, empty face, on his mother's body, on everything and sleep won. He kept them closed a second too long and it was over.  
  
Sleep took him like a rip tide, pulling him under head first. He tried to brace himself against the desk but his grip slipped instantly and his body hit the floor, knocking the chair askew. Ronan felt the impact but sleep was rapidly dulling his every sense of the outside world. He fell asleep like he was drowning, fighting and gasping and then when it was too late, giving in...


	11. Chapter 11

Adam was woken by Chainsaw urgently nipping at his fingers. Her talons were planted firmly in his forearm as she troubled his hands with her beak.   
  
"Ow."   
  
He tried to shake her off but she dug into his arm until his eyes opened and he swore.   
  
"What?" He demanded of her grumpily. The feathers on her beast were puffed and she flapped her large wings, black as oil and hopped over onto the other side of the bed where Ronan should have been asleep.  
  
It was empty. The cover peeled back, the sheets cold. Bastard. He was supposed to be sleeping.   
  
"Where did he go?" Adam asked rubbing the sleep from his eyes.   
  
Chainsaw cawed, loud and shrill as Adam tugged on his pants and a shirt. He glanced at the clock. 2:48. He was going to kill Ronan. Because of course he couldn't go back to sleep now. He'd have to hunt him down and drag his ass back upstairs and watch him this time to make sure he fell asleep. Adam knew why he didn't want to dream but this would be the fourth night in a row. He couldn't keep going like this. He'd have to face it eventually and Adam would be there with him. Just like they'd done everything on this fucked up whirlwind of a quest, together.   
  
"Kerah!" Chainsaw screamed above him.   
  
"Alright, alright. I'm coming."  
  
Adam bounded down the stairs after her. When they made it to the kitchen she swooped in small circles by the back door. Adam squinted out into the darkness and saw Orphan Girl racing across the grass, terror on her little face. Adam thought she was sleeping upstairs. He burst out the door and ran to meet her.   
  
"What is it?! What's wrong?"  
  
He knelt in front of her. There were tears in her wild eyes. Adam put a hand over her tiny cheek.   
  
"Kerah! Auxilium!" She cried. Help him.  
  
Adam's heart slammed into his sternum as panic cut an agonizing path in his veins.   
  
"Where is he?  
  
She scrambled to her feet and tugged him along. The glowing flowers overhead raced after them as they went. Adam could see his heartbeat in his eyes, his vision throbbing with adrenaline, with twisting fear. She wasn't moving fast enough, but when Adam saw where she was headed, he took off into the barn. He raced past the sleeping cattle to Niall's desk. The chair was empty and Adam whipped around, frantically searching. He found a pair of long legs on the floor behind the desk.   
  
"Ronan! Jesus Christ."    
  
Ronan Lynch looked more unconscious than asleep. The evidence around him made it obvious he'd fallen not laid down. Like he'd just lost a fight and his opponent had left him for dead.   
  
His right eye was swelling under a dark purple bruise, his lip was split and blood was splattered down his chin. Adam crashed to his knees beside him and watched new injuries manifest themselves across his skin as he dreamt them. The sweatshirt he wore was unzipped and Adam could see bruises blossoming along his ribcage in that strange way between real and not real that was hard to keep your eyes on.   
  
"Ronan," Adam said, shaking his shoulder. "Come on, Lynch. Wake up."   
  
The skin near Ronan's temple opened and blood came streaming out.   
  
"Fuck!"   
  
Another at his shoulder, as blood darkened the sweatshirt and seeped onto the hay smattered floor boards.   
  
No, no, no. Adam looked around, desperately for another Ronan, the real Ronan, sitting somewhere watching the body he'd dreamed up to take his take place die. But he was alone. Alone with Ronan's blood on his shaking hands.   
  
"Ronan!" Adam shook him violently now, but Ronan's eyes stayed closed, his dark brows furrowed, trapped inside his own head.  
  
Adam couldn't lose him. Not now, not after everything. He wouldn't survive. Adam was adept at survival and now with a painful encompassing explosion in his chest, he realized that his survival meant Ronan's survival. If Ronan lived Adam lived. And that was that.   
  
He pulled a floating orb from the air around them and brought it to his eyes, the white light blinding him, bleaching him. He walked his mind into it, his thoughts singular and laser like.  
  
Ronan Ronan Ronan where are you


	12. Chapter 12

Ronan was in Monmouth. Standing at the front door, afraid to go in but not knowing why. His hand reached for the doorknob, and because Ronan Lynch wasn't a coward, he turned it and stepped inside.  
  
Everything was the same, the starkness of Gansey's room, the moonlight pouring in, the model of Henrietta at his feet. He sighed, relieved.  
  
"You're here," Gansey's voice said and Ronan walked toward him. He found his friend sitting on the floor, propped up against his bed, his wireframes on, in usual insomniac Gansey fashion.  
  
"I was hoping you were gone for good."  
  
"Fuck you," Ronan said, but there was no heat in his words because Gansey had sounded serious.  
  
He looked up at Ronan, obvious distain darkening his handsome features. Gansey was looking at him like he'd done Kavinsky, with loathing and disgust.  
  
"God, you're such a disappointment, Ronan. Do you know what I had to do to get you through school? What I had to do to get you out of trouble all these years? I died to save you, man, and you're still nothing."  
  
Anger boiled in Ronan's chest, hot and raging.  
  
"What the fuck, Gansey?"  
  
"You heard me. Why can't you do anything right? You just keep letting everyone around you down. You keep putting everyone around you in danger, getting your family killed. How long before it's Declan? Before it's one of us? How long before it's Matthew?"  
  
Gansey's poisonous words worked under Ronan's skin. His hands balled into fists. He was shaking with fury, bursting at the seams, he was bomb seconds from detonating and taking everything down with him.  
  
"It's so hard to take care of you. So much energy to keep you alive. You're a burden with no rewards. Jesus, Lynch why don't you do us all a favor and go the same way as your deadbeat father, as your imposter mother-"  
  
Ronan lunged for him, grabbing Gansey by the collar of his shirt, but when he blinked, Gansey was dead. Eyes open, staring at nothing, pale and frigid. his limp body fell out of Ronan's hands and wasps began to crawl out of his gaping mouth.  
  
"No! Gansey!" Ronan screamed but the wasps doubled on him. He ran for his bedroom, for sanctuary.  
  
When he threw open the door, he was outside. Monmouth was gone.  
  
He was standing in the godforsaken front yard of Robert Parrish's double wide trailer. The light of his BMW threw his dusty silhouette against the cheap siding. He watched Robert let Adam fall down the stairs. Ronan's stomach turned violently when he heard the crack of Adam's head on the railing. And then he lunged for Robert.  
  
They fought just as they had all those months ago, cheap shots, scuffling, blood. Ronan felt that same desire to rip him apart, to make him pay for what he'd done to Adam. But Robert had Ronan on the ground, kicking in his ribs. Ronan couldn't get up. His eyes found Adam unsuccessfully trying to climb to his feet. This wasn't how it happened. Where were the police?  
  
"Open your eyes, boy. I want you to see this." Adam's father said to Ronan. But he could only open one, the other was already swelling shut.  
  
Robert Parrish drew a gun from his waist. Ronan knew it. It was silver and had the word dreamkiller scrawled across the barrel. Without ceremony or delay he pointed the gun at his son and shot Adam in the head. He collapsed in the dirt.  
  
Before Ronan had the chance to scream, he found himself sitting in a pew in St. Agnes next to Matthew.  
  
His little brother looked to him, his face coated in tears.  
  
"Why did you kill mom?" He asked softly.  
  
"Matthew-"  
  
"I know what you told us. But I think it was you. And I think you killed dad, too," he sobbed. "You could've done something. You didn't have to bring her there. She was safe at home."  
  
Ronan felt himself start to cry too. It was all true.  
  
"I don't want to be your brother anymore," Matthew said and he sounded like a little kid again, his voice breaking, his chest heaving with uncontrolled tears. He didn't try to hit Ronan as Declan might have. He just stood up and walked toward the aisle.  
  
"Wait!" Ronan called after him, desperately.  
  
He scrambled to catch his brother, to fall to his knees before him and beg forgiveness, but the pews shrank and spread out into grass. The doors of the church dissolved into the gate where Noah had found him struggling in his own blood months before. Where the paramedics had scooped him off the pavement and put him back together again.  
  
But this time his dad was there. Niall Lynch stood, a future portrait of Ronan, his arms outstretched. Ronan ran to him and let his father embrace him. Relief pulsed gloriously through him. If his father was here, he was ok. He rubbed his son's back and turned to whisper in his ear.  
  
"You failed me."  
  
The words perforated Ronan like bullets. He staggered back with the pain of them and watched his father's face change. His mouth sharpened and stretched until it became a cruel beak, he grew tall, his fingers curling into claws. Ronan watched until there was no more Niall left, only night horror.  
  
Once, not long ago he had learned to control them. But that had ended when he saw his mother in Cabeswater, butchered, unmade. Before he knew in his heart that it had been his fault.  
  
The night horror lunged for him, striking his head with its vicious claws. Ronan went down and felt his blood leaving him.  
  
“Ronan,”  
  
The night horror loomed over him and jabbed his beak into Ronan's shoulder pinning him to the ground. His hands struggled and slipped off the beak, his head swimming with pain. This was it. He was finally going to die. There was no more Noah to come find him.  
  
"Ronan!" Adam's voice called.  
  
And then Ronan could see him, manifesting there in his nightmare. Adam ran toward him and the night horror clumsily broke away from Ronan. Adam's face appeared in his vision, eyes wide with panic.  
  
"Wake up, Ronan!" He begged.  
  
"I can't."  
  
"Yes, you can! That thing is coming back."  
  
"Get the hell out of here, Adam." Ronan growled, his voice fading with every word.  
  
"No, fuck that." Adam shouted. "You have to wake up. If you die, you know what happens to Mathew. Control it."  
  
Ronan's head fell to the side, finding the horror rushing toward them, silent as death.  
  
He couldn't remember how he'd done it before. How he'd gotten the albino horror to obey him, how he'd staved off his nightmares for months. But he remembered Matthew.  
  
He looked up into Adams eyes, hard and set with the determination to survive and Ronan felt a dream making itself in his palm.  
  
It was something easy, something he had memorized the weight and texture of long ago. One of the big knives in the kitchen at the Barns. The one his father used to carve turkey with.  
  
With a last burst of energy Ronan twisted himself between the beast and Adam and thrust the knife up into its neck.  
  
Just as Ronan fell back, Adam grabbed his hand and pulled them out into consciousness. 

***  
  
"Jesus," Adam breathed as his mind snapped back into his body like a rubber band.  
  
His eyes swam back into focus to find Ronan on the floor of the barn. His eyes were winking open then closed again, his face screwed up in pain. Adam’s hands went to staunch the blood at his shoulder. This was so close to the scene in St. Agnes. Adam could still remember the light fading from the dreamt Ronan's eyes.  
  
"Shit. Shit. Stay awake, Ronan. Stay here. Stay with me."  
  
Orphan Girl scrambled over to them and held something out to Adam. It was a small white container without a label. Adam had one just like it in his glovebox. This one had a fine layer of dust on the lid that had only been disturbed by their fingers. Adam turned it over to find handwriting on the back. It looked like Ronan's, but more leaning, the letters more stretched and musical. It's said, First Aid.  
  
Adam understood and unscrewed it.  
  
"Go get me a towel," he commanded and Orphan Girl galloped off. The cream inside smelt like summer wind and salty ocean air. She returned a moment later with a rag and Adam peeled the sweatshirt off Ronan's shoulder. He cleaned up as much of the blood and he could and scooped a finger full of the balm onto the jagged skin.  
  
Almost at once, the edges began to inch toward each other, closing the gaping flesh. They turned pink and puckered, healing. He repeated the process at Ronan's head and sat back, shaking and hardly breathing, watching Niall Lynch save his son from the grave.  
  
Ronan's eyes opened at last. He grimaced, trying to sit up. He gave up mid slouch, his strength finished, pain lingering.  
  
"Jesus. Christ." Adam whispered, the panic rushing out of him.  
  
Ronan looked at Adam and Adam looked back. The space between them light and electrified. Adam crawled closer and sat beside him, their shoulders pressed together.  
  
"Ronan-"  
  
"My mom's dead."  
  
"I know. It's not your fault."  
  
"It is," Ronan said and because he never lied, Adam knew he meant it.  
  
He grabbed for Ronan's hand and held as hard as he could, hard enough to leave marks, hard enough to hold Ronan there with him instead of spiraling down into a unreachable prison of guilt and self-hatred.  
  
"It's not. It's no more your fault than it was mine when my hands were wrapped around your throat, when they were tearing at Blue's face. We didn't wake that demon, Ronan. It's not your fault."  
  
He felt Ronan's head drop onto his shoulder and felt the soundless tears soak into his t-shirt. He leaned into Adam and grieved for his mother the way he never let himself for his father. This time he would do it in the comfort of his rightful home. This time he wouldn’t do it alone.


	13. Chapter 13

Ronan woke to fingers ghosting over his head. Adam was above him, eyes narrowed, analyzing. Ronan allowed himself the unfathomable pleasure of admiring Adam without having to dart his eyes away at the last minute. Something he would never have thought possible months ago.  
  
Adam smirked when he felt Ronan's eyes on him but his brows were still furrowed in concentration.   
  
"Jesus god, Parrish. What time is it?" His voice rasped, raw with the morning and the nightmare.   
  
"6:15."  
  
Ronan groaned.   
  
"It's healing nicely, but..." Adam said, still skeptical, brushing his thumb over Ronan's temple. The touch sent shivers exploding through him.   
  
Ronan had the forgotten container of cream until Adam showed him what had saved his life. His mom used to pull the little tubs out of the medicine cabinet whenever they had played too rough as kids. A slather of the cream and a band-aid and none of the Lynch brothers ever thought twice about why their skin took no time to seal itself again.  
  
It wasn't until his father died, until his mother fell into sleep, until they were thrown and barred from their home did they learn what it meant to bleed. To nurse wounds that never healed.   
  
Adam didn't need to be worried. If his father had dreamt it, it worked. Ronan pushed himself to sit up in the bed. He was sore, the muscles in his shoulder still merging back together, his head thumping against his temple.   
  
"There's no way I can convince you to come to school," Adam said, not asked. He knew the answer already.   
  
Ronan caught his hand and brought it to his lips.   
  
"I'll be all right," he said against Adam's fingers. And he felt it now, that he would be.   
  
Adam sighed, looking at Ronan's shoulder and head, scrutinizing.   
  
"Get out of here, asshole." Ronan said. "You're going to be late."   
  
"Fine," Adam sprang up from the bed, carefully pulled on his Aglionby sweater and grabbed his bag.   
  
"The keys are-"  
  
Adam held out his hand and the keys to the BMW swung from one of his long fingers. Ronan's keys jingled in Adams hands while he smirked and the sight was enough to make Ronan hard again.   
  
"I'll see you later," Adam said, his eyes narrowed, his mouth pressed into a thin line.  
  
Ronan was well enough versed in Adam's expressions to know he was thinking, fretting about a problem and how he was going to fit all of the pieces he had at his disposal into a solution.   
  
"If you fall asleep can you at least have your phone nearby?"   
  
"Whatever," Ronan said.   
  
"Don't be shitty. I mean it. Last night was..." Adam shook his head, his eyes falling closed. Ronan's heart thumped wildly at Adams pain. He had saved Ronan's life. Again.   
  
"Adam, I will."   
  
Adam nodded and headed for out the door. Ronan heard his footfalls hit the stairs and then stop halfway. He rushed back into the room and walked straight for the bed where Ronan still sprawled. He grabbed Ronan's jaw and kissed him full and hard on the mouth.   
  
"Bye," Adam whispered on Ronan's lips.   
  
"Asshole," Ronan said, breathless with half a mind to pull him down into the bed and provide him with motivation to start skipping school. Adam flew down the stairs and out the front door. 

After popping a few Tylenol Ronan began moving about the house. He passed Mathews room where the orphan girl was still sleeping in a tiny ball then found Chainsaw pecking around the basket of blocks. He turned them over with his foot so she could have better access. When she saw him, her head cocked to the side and she asked "Kerah?"  
  
"I'm okay."  
  
She flapped up to his shoulder and bent over to inspect his wound, not taking his word for it. Once she was satisfied he wasn't going to die, she nipped his finger and hopped back to the floor.   
  
Ronan set himself to work cleaning the mud caked on the kitchen tiles. He and Adam had tracked in a ton on their way inside last night. He grabbed some peanuts and a plum from the strange trees when his search through the cabinets turned out fruitless. He was halfway through making a grocery list when Orphan Girl come crashing down the stairs.   
  
"I'm in here, runt," he called and she ran to his legs like a wrecking ball.  
  
She clung to him tightly for a few moments then delivered a tiny but efficient punch to his stomach.  
  
"What the hell!?"   
  
She looked up at him, furious. "When I say sleep, sleep!"  
  
Ronan scoffed.   
  
"You scared me! You scared him. No more." She punched him again for good measure.   
  
"All right, all right." He conceded. "I'm sorry."   
  
She nodded once and then followed him out into the fields.   
  
The day passed like this: Ronan fed the deer and his buck and their grace reminded him of his mother. His heart clenched.  
  
Orphan Girl dug through his father's heaps of dream junk, depositing small treasures at his feet, a 45 that spun and played on its own, a bracelet that wouldn’t loosen on the wearer's wrist until asked nicely. A photo of his mom that moved. Ronan watched her smile and laugh at Niall, radiating childish joy. His heart clenched.   
And finally he set off to the oak she had always loved in the right field. His mother used to climb it and send Niall up in after her with only her laughter to guide him through the leaves. The one she leaned against to read to her sons, stroking her finger through Matthews curls.   
  
Ronan dropped to his knees before it and wept for his mother. He began the long and arduous process of forgiving himself for what had happened. He fastened two of its fallen bare branches together and drove the longest one into the earth between the trees roots. A cross.   
  
He heard hoof beats falling across the ground behind him and orphan girl came to a clumsy stop at his side. She looked at the cross, then at Ronan and she unfurled her little fist to reveal a stone.   
  
It was a luminescent white and ever changing in the light, flashes of green and blue and red. It must have been his father's creation. It looked like the more beautiful and impossible relative of a gemstone.   
  
"An opal," Ronan said.   
  
Orphan Girl laid it at the foot of the makeshift cross. She walked back and plopped in his lap. Ronan leaned against the sturdy trunk and thought about his mother, about the way she had loved her sons. He thought about his father's flaws and his brilliance and how he'd have to find a healthy blend of it all for himself. He thought about making a garden in the east field and what he might plant there. Tomato and zucchini, herbs and raspberries. He thought that Opal was a pretty good name. He thought about Adam; waking up and still seeing him in bed beside him, which class he was in at that moment.   
  
He went back to the house, showered and plumbed the library. He pulled down a few books from the shelves and felt lengths of drowsy, purposeful time unspool in front of him, a sense of comfort and rightness that only came from being in his home.   
  
Ronan heard the Pig grumble into the driveway around 3:30. He was sitting on the back porch overlooking the fields and skimming through one of his father's books on dreaming he'd plucked from the library.   
  
"Lynch?"  
  
"Out here," he called back to Gansey and breathed out.   
  
Gansey over his house again. Gansey alive. Despite everything that had happened, things were okay. They were going to be alright and Ronan could feel it, believe in it, hold it in his hands like something he might bring back from his dreams. He wondered what hope would look like if he tried to manifest it.   
Gansey strolled out into the porch, his shoes already kicked off. For a fleeting moment Ronan's bruised mind recalled the memory of him, lifeless and vacant and layered it over the very alive Gansey before him now. Terror owned him for a second but he blinked and it was gone. Gansey was just Gansey, well meaning, scholarly, brotherly Gansey.   
  
"You're okay." Gansey sighed somewhat relieved.   
  
"Obviously."  
  
"Jesus, Adam told me what happened last night. You could've died."  
  
Ronan leveled a look at him. "Just running with the theme of this week."  
  
Gansey rolled his eyes and sat in the chair beside Ronan. They let the sounds of crickets and a whispering breeze pass between them as they looked out on the fields. It was the song of Ronan's past. Of his present. His mouth quirked.   
  
"If Adam hadn't been here..." Gansey mumbled, carrying on his worried thoughts out loud.    
  
"He was, Gansey." Ronan said. Adam had been there. Ronan turned his face away to hide the furious joy he couldn't keep off his features. When he turned back he found Gansey's eyes on him.   
  
"Where’s Parrish?" Ronan asked to change the subject, to escape Gansey's probing stare, to inject some normalcy into the past few days that had been overfull of death and pain, and because he really wanted to know.   
  
"Work," Gansey gave a lazy gesture that said, where else?   
  
"Did he send you to check up on me?" The thought just occurred and it both infuriated and elated him.   
  
"Don't be an ass," Gansey said which meant yes. After a minute he added, "We don't have to talk about it, you know." The statement was pointed and Ronan felt the tip of it grazing his heart.  
  
Chronologically, things developing with Adam were new. But they didn't feel green. The two of them had been woven together with Gansey, with Blue, with Noah for so long. There was really no point in keeping it hidden from them. It seemed exhausting when he and Blue had tried it.   
  
"Really, Dick? It sounds like we're talking about it right now."  
  
"I'm just saying you can tell me when you're ready." The you was heavier than the other words which meant Adam already had.   
  
"Whatever," Ronan said with a smirk and it made Gansey's face spread into a happy smile before he looked out at the field once more.   
  
They spent the afternoon talking and eating the burgers Gansey had brought. They took turns throwing peanuts to Chainsaw and watched Opal chasing after Ronan's fireflies in the dusky light.   
  
Gansey didn't pester him about school. They remembered Noah, trading stories of him, collecting all of their memories together in Monmouth, at Nino's, eating gelato, at the dollar store, spilling them out and riffling through them leisurely. Ronan showed him where he'd made the cross and Gansey put a hand on his shoulder as he recalled the time Aurora had found an ancient Beatles record for him in the library. Then they went back inside and Gansey grabbed his keys.   
  
"I'm going to go pick Jane up from work. We'll see you guys at Nino's tomorrow at 6?"  
  
"Sure."  
  
Gansey stopped at the door with his hand on the knob, his expression faltering. His forehead creased in concentration or worry.   
  
"What are we going to do without Glendower?"   
  
Ronan looked at him from the couch. What he really meant was, what am I going to do without Glendower.   
  
"We start looking for the next thing."   
  
It seemed simple. An obvious answer to Gansey's question. For Ronan, it had never been about Glendower. Not anywhere near to the extent it had been for Gansey. Glendower had never consumed Ronan, never been the object of his obsession for years. He had never needed to find the king. For Ronan, at first it had been a distraction from the fire razing across his soul, but then after Kavinsky, after pulling his brother from the trunk of that car, after scraping his knees on rock bottom, he realized it was about being close to his family. His new one.   
  
Gansey nodded. "See you tomorrow." 

Adam pulled in a half hour later and let himself into the house. Ronan didn't bother to squash down the swell in his chest at seeing Adam tossing his bag familiarly on the couch and coming to drop down beside him.   
Before getting comfortable, Adam reached over him and roughly yanked the neck of his t-shirt over to observe his shoulder.   
  
"Not even a hello," Ronan said, his lips almost grazing Adams ear.   
  
"Shut up, Lynch."   
  
Adam brushed his thumb over the tender pink scar that had closed over his wound during the day. The touch sent shocks rushing downward. Ronan's hands came around Adam, slipping his fingers under his stained work shirt, trailing over his ribs. Adam leaned slowly down to press a gentle kiss over the scar.   
  
Ronan's mind blissfully emptied as Adam began to kiss him.   
  
There was pain inside them but there was something new and infinitely better too. It was made entirely of the light Ronan loved to dream of.  
  
There were wounds to heal. There were hands to kiss. There were adventures to embark on, more treasures for them to hunt all together. There was a new and better Cabeswater to dream.   
  
There was loss. But there was work to do.


End file.
